Rushdie 'not good enough' for Booker shortlist

From Booker's best to bottom of the heap ... Salman Rushdie. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence was simply not a good enough book to make it past the longlist stage of this year's Booker prize, according to the chair of judges, Michael Portillo. To add insult to the double Booker of Booker winner's injured pride, Portillo added that the judges didn't even spend that much time discussing it.

"I can say that the discussions we had about Salman Rushdie, as with all the other books, was a discussion about the book and not about the author. It was about the merits of the book," he told theguardian.com after the press conference at which the shortlist was announced.

"In the opinion of these five people taken together, Salman Rushdie's was not one of the top six books for us. We didn't have a huge debate about it."

Not only has Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence failed to make the cut, two of the other most hotly tipped contenders for the £50,000 prize have also been overlooked: Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog and Joseph O'Neill's post 9/11 tale of New York and cricket Netherland.

Instead, the judges have selected six novels - including two debuts - which cover a wide geographical spread and which they described as "intensely readable" and "page-turning".

Judge and novelist Louise Doughty said there had been "a bit of debate" about the sixth title to make the shortlist, but that there were five books the judges "absolutely agreed on".

"We're braced for it," Doughty said of criticism over the exclusion of the favourites. "We've no doubts – there's nothing in there that was a compromise."

Bookmakers, who had placed Rushdie and O'Neill as favourites to take the prize, rapidly recalculated their odds after the shortlist was announced. Sebastian Barry has now been declared favourite to win by William Hill with The Secret Scripture. Barry's novel is an alternative history of Ireland, told through the journals of a nonagenarian woman who has spent most of her life in a mental hospital, and her psychiatrist.

The judges' fondness for large-scale narratives, revealed at the longlist stage, is followed through on the shortlist with Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies making the cut. It is the first of a projected trilogy, spanning decades and continents, which opens in 1838 on the eve of the first opium war. Portillo described it as a "big, rumbustious sort of a book".

Falling into the same camp is an exceptionally confident debut by an Australian writer, Steve Toltz. A massive 700-page narrative rollercoaster, A Fraction of the Whole skips from anecdote to incident to twist as a father rants and reflects his way to making a confession to his son. "It's a very Australian book – it's wonderfully irreverent," said Portillo.

Philip Hensher's ambitious state-of-the-nation novel, Northern Clemency, is also in the running. Set in Sheffield between 1974 and 1984, it is a broad, sweeping portrait of life in Thatcher's Britain, told through the relationship between two families. "It's a huge book, but I don't want to put anyone off with that," said Portillo. "It's just a wonderfully developed story of ordinary people in Sheffield."

The other debut novel to appear on the list is The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Adiga, who is Times magazine's Asia correspondent, exposes the underbelly of India's new Tiger economy. The story is told through the letters of Balram who escapes the poverty of rural India to become a rich businessman in Delhi, but has committed a murder to reach his place in the "new" India.

Portillo said the two debuts were "two books which absolutely blow your cobwebs away". He added: "In a way you can tell these are debut novels, not because of any deficiencies but because of their freshness."

The only woman to make it through to the shortlist is Linda Grant with The Clothes on Their Backs, a story of secrets and pasts and how the clothes we wear define us all.

The former Conservative MP and cabinet minister Michael Portillo is joined on the judging panel by Alex Clark, editor of Granta; Louise Doughty, novelist; James Heneage, founder of Ottakar's bookshops; and TV and radio broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli. The chair of the judges is paid £10,000, while judges receive £7,500, as well as all 112 novels.

Doughty said she had set aside a day a week to work on her own writing while reading through the books. "It's been a bit bizarre working on my own novel while reading the cream of contemporary fiction," she added. "Reading a book a day for three months, we started to feel as if we'd become allergic to contemporary fiction."

The winner will be announced on Tuesday October 14 at a dinner at London's Guildhall. The shortlist in full is: Aravind Adiga The White Tiger Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

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